Sunday, June 15, 1997

Web being built into variety of appliances

By REID KANALEY / Knight-Ridder Newspapers

ATLANTA - The World Wide Web already seems widespread, but high-tech industry officials who gathered here Tuesday say it is about to become even more so.

At least they hope it is.

The Web is being increasingly liberated from the personal computer. A variety of computer and telephone companies are racing to market with an array of Web-enabled devices - from Net-surfing wireless phones and pagers to video-game machines that get e-mail. And this is on top of the wave of "Internet appliances," such as WebTV already in stores.

It's all part of a phenomenon that techies have been touting for the last few years, a blurring of media, hardware and telecommunications, dubbed "convergence."

Many of these appliances bear little resemblance to the home computers now most commonly used to access the online world.

One, for example, is the Nokia 9000, a digital wireless telephone whose back opens to display a narrow computer screen and tiny keyboard. The unit is heading for market later this year and will sell for about $1,000.

"Web services will come in the handsets - not full graphics, but you will get access to data that you deem important," Haroon Alvi, Nokia's manager of advanced development, said while displaying the device during a panel presentation at the Comdex trade show.

Comdex is a massive computer and electronics show held in the spring and fall each year in the United States, and at other times around the world. The spring show opened Monday and is expected to draw more 100,000 visitors by the time it closes Wednesday.

Another example of the new generation of devices is the Web-browsing version of the Sega Saturn game machine, which uses stripped-down software that takes up only about 5 percent of the computer memory required by either of the heavy-hitting Web browsers made popular to computer users by Microsoft and Netscape.

The software on the Sega, written by a small Silicon Valley company called PlanetWeb, can run on a video telephone and other small devices, said PlanetWeb spokesman Ken Soohoo.

The consensus at the panel presentation, and out on the exhibit floors, is that the Web could turn up virtually anywhere that consumers decide they want it.

In some cases, as with the Sega device, Internet access can be added as a feature for $50 to $100, instead of the $1,000 to $2,000 entry price for PC-based access.

"There's no such thing as a simple device that's perfect for everybody," said J. Stuart Read, vice president for market development at Diba Inc., a Silicon Valley company whose Internet-browsing equipment is built into a Samsung television set on display at the show.

Read, another panel speaker, said Diba has also been working on a "smart" land-line telephone with a screen for access to the Web and e-mail.

Phil Goldman, who co-founded WebTV 18 months ago, said his company's vision was "to bring the Internet to the mainstream consumer." The company's product, a $250 set-top box that displays the Web over any television set, was heavily marketed last Christmas, but initial sales have been disappointing. By some estimates, Sony and Magnavox have sold about 300,000 WebTV boxes.

Other companies are taking a crack at the market for Internet via TV. For example, a Canadian firm, WebSurfer Inc., is displaying its similar product at Comdex, and several companies are marketing systems for delivering the Internet over cable television.

Goldman, however, told the panel that WebTV, now owned by Microsoft Corp., remains committed to making the Internet less of a "leaning-in" experience of computer geeks sitting inches from a monitor screen, and more of a "leaning-back, couch-potato experience."

Read acknowledged that the Internet-appliance market remained in the "early-adopter stage," meaning the products appeal mostly to avid, must-have consumers.

But he predicted that success for Internet appliances was now attainable because the huge amount of information and entertainment available online has reached a critical mass. "Today, there's enough information out on the Net that it's interesting," Read said. "... People who are not geeky want to have access."

"These devices probably weren't worth building two years ago," agreed Goldman. The situation has been helped by the unrelenting drop in costs, especially for computer memory, and in the steady increase in modem speeds.

"But I would caution that we're barely there right now," Goldman added. Because it is so chaotic and hard to navigate, he said, "the Web is still a very scary place" that could turn off consumers.